OCT 13 | Student Talk: Lucas Mason-Brown ’13, “Roger Williams’ Lost Treatise: Progress Towards Solving a 17th century mystery.”

OCTOBER 13 Student Talk: Lucas Mason-Brown ’13, “Roger Williams’ Lost Treatise: Progress Towards Solving a 17th century mystery.” Limited to 15 attendees. OPEN TO ALL. Please register. JCB Conference Room, 10:00 a.m.

Between 1679 and his death in 1683, Roger Williams, the famous 17th century theologian and founder of Rhode Island, took over 200 pages of notes in the margins of a book now in the possession of the JCB. The catch? These notes were written in code. About six months ago, Lucas Mason-Brown ’13 cracked this code and has since translated over 180 pages of marginalia. His translations reveal, among other things, an original essay on the issue of infant baptism. Lucas will speak about the process of deciphering a 17th century code and about the content of the translated material.

Lucas Mason-Brown is undergraduate at Brown concentrating in math and the philosophy of science. Lucas is an aspiring cryptographer and has also deciphered several pages of encoded marginalia found in an early edition of the Eliot Indian Bible, housed at the John Hay Library.